Hey Dan, Dan said: How does reality exist apart from experience?
Matt said: Same way that this is true: "The way I read it, since the MOQ states reality begins with Dynamic Quality experience, it is the idea that reality exists that comes before the existence of reality." You said that in the earlier part of your post to explain how "reality existed before we personally did" within the frame of the MoQ. So if one is moved to say a variation of the statement "well, Don, you know reality does exist apart from our direct experience of it," the explanation of this statement is not a metaphysical variant of SOM, but rather that Don, for some reason, was suggesting that his dog's food dish didn't exist when he wasn't in the room with it (and then all the attendant worries about whether his dog was starving to death). Dan said then: How does Don know if his dog's food dish exists when he's apart from experiencing it? Matt: You asked a series of rhetorical questions, but I wanted to isolate this one because, like your earlier use of "truth" in a way I called Platonistic, this seems to me like a use of "know" that is Cartesian--the only answer you will accept is "he doesn't." (Your use of "empirical evidence" after this is similarly SOMistic.) This is because you've accepted the Cartesian stance of the first-person-subject _alone_ facing the object-world. When Descartes doubted so hard that he considered seriously the idea that every experience he has might be a dream, he was hoping for a foundation to put the object-world back together again from only the conceptual materials provided by a solitary first-person-subject (which is why the problem of solipsism looms in post-Cartesian epistemology). You, however, don't have this hope, and so use the question to say that it's all imaginary and dreamlike. Here is what you went on to say Dan said: It seems a bit like the zen koan that asks of a tree falls in the forest with no one around does it make a sound? I think RMP answers that along the lines of: what food dish? But what exactly does that mean? It seems to indicate that imaginary trees and dog dishes exist only in the mind. We learn to assume the dog dish exists even when there is no empirical evidence of its existence. In the same way we assume there is a history to the world that existed before we personally appeared and will continue to exist after we pass away even though there is no way to empirically verify this notion. Whether or not Don's dog dish exists apart from the empirical evidence of its existence is a question rooted in the conviction that there is a real world out there. Take away that conviction and all that is left is the imagination. Matt: This runs exactly parallel to your use of truth in "no one history of rocks is any more true than another," where it assumes that truth is determined by its accuracy to a reality against which the histories can be checked, _but_ rather than staging that Platonic project, you only want to use it to say that that truth is unavailable, and so "no one history of rocks is any more true than another." You are here saying that our knowledge of this "out there" reality is unavailable, and so it is imaginary. But "imaginary," as in _all_ cases of the use of the word, only makes sense by contrast to "real"--but what "reality" does it contrast to? The worst case scenario is the Cartesian sense of "reality," but we were supposed to be rejecting that S/O contrast by accepting the MoQ, so that sense should be unavailable to you. You might say "our direct experiences of rocks are real, so rocks-apart-from-us achieve their imaginary status in contrast to that." But what, I might ask mirroring your question, does that exactly mean? Is their no check on our imagining of what the world is like apart from our direct experience of it? Say Don's in the living room fretting about his dog not getting enough food because he isn't hovering around the food dish in the kitchen. Without that direct experience of the food dish, Don worries the dish won't be there for Fido. Don's buddy Chris gets tired of the moaning over Fido's fate and goes into the kitchen. Chris then yells out from the kitchen, "Fido's dish is still here!" Should Don be less fretful? Why? He, after all, is _not_ directly experiencing the food dish: Chris is. Don is only directly experiencing the noise coming out of the kitchen that comes in the form of a sentence expressing information. If we use the sense of "know" you are using, Dan, then Don will still be in the same position, fretting over Fido's survival because he is not directly experiencing the food dish. However, wouldn't we want to say that his imaginary sense of the existence of Fido's food dish is _enhanced_ in some way by his direct experience of Chris's words? I think we do. This enhancement can be articulated in many different ways at this point, but to deny an effect on what you called the imagination in this context is to deny common sense assumptions. And for what use? (I'll get back to that in a moment.) I think the best way to stage the enhancement is to first deny that the primary context of "to know" is the solitary first-person-subject. I think that is the Cartesian context. To suggest "knowing" something is to be in an _inter_personal context, to be in a web of other people's imaginings, if you will. This allows the following response to your penultimate statement: "Whether or not Don's dog dish exists apart from the empirical evidence of its existence is a question rooted in the conviction that there is a real world out there." 1) "Empirical evidence" should be construed interpersonally, so that nobody would suggest that a dog dish does exist apart from the empirical evidence of its existence, though of course some evidence is indirect reporting from other first-person-subjects. 2) The "conviction" is one found in every community that has dealt with dog dishes in other rooms. This conviction is _not_, though, the Cartesian sense of a "real world out there." Dan said: "Normal" people have learned to assume with conviction that they did feed Fido, that they did turn off the tea kettle, that they did lock the door, and they go on their way without a second thought. These people are the hardest to convince that a concrete reality doesn't exist apart from the experience of it. Of course it does. What they fail to discern is that the reality that exists is imaginary. Matt: What I'm wondering is why it matters so much that everyone think that "a concrete reality doesn't exist apart from the experience of it." Why is it so important to not fail in discerning that "the reality that exists is imaginary"? One way of thinking about the importance set up by your train of thought is that people who don't understand that reality is imaginary won't second-guess themselves--they won't _reflect_, they will pass on Socratic self-examination and live as Achillean "men of action." But did Socrates think that reality was imaginary in the sense that you do above? I think only in an attenuated sense, and I'm not sure why one needs complicated metaphysical views (or paradoxical ones) to be able to get oneself to pause once in a while and reflect, "_Did_ I turn off the kettle?" Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
